You mentioned cheap labor several times. What's driving up our labor costs?
We live in a nation with some adherence to rule of law, and we have a lot of them (laws).
They are there, ostensibly, to make life better for the majority.
So companies have to hire people like Duffy to make sure the rules are followed because companies/people are flawed/imperfect...which is why we have laws in the first place.
This is just one easy example of things that drive up costs. ('Easy' because most people would agree with this reasoning, or so I like to believe.)
I don't think we killed skilled European mfg.
Cheap USA labor was more about damaging the British manufacturing base than the European base due to us being a colony back in the day. Even so, if you think a fair bit of USA manufacturing went to China and not European/German manufacturing, well, I am sure there are alternate views about this.
Single case in point, the Swiss friends we have who visit us yearly like to show off their Swiss brands like Mammut and then point to the 'Made in China' tag and ruefully laugh and say, "We are like you now." They're buying Levi's made in Mexico just like we are....though you can buy made in USA Levis from the main store here in SF for like $200 or so.
Cheap labor cheap labor cheap labor - this is a neo-liberal economic talking point. There is an extent to which that is true since scaling manufacturing often requires more people.
There seems to be no political will to do anything. Mfg was certainly dying before neoliberal economics, but the latter seems to have sapped the will to do anything but increase the
FIRE economy, government sector, and health sectors, the cost of which is ultimately passed down to the worker/citizen. The elites will not come up with a plan since they are bugmen.
Sorry for bringing up a" neo-liberal economic talking point", but since you seem to not dispute it too much nor bring up a non-neo-liberal economic talking point, I am not sure what you are getting at by pointing that out. We got the system we got because of things that preceded us....its the way it is for a reason and it certainly can be tweaked going forward (and hopefully, this doesn't upset the apple cart too much).
In any case, I rarely think there is just one thing that makes any BIG thing happen when it comes to human systems of function. Cheap labor is a driver, but who is steering the thing, who made the thing, where is the thing going, why is it doing it, etc, etc.
Like I had said, lots of books have been written trying to answer these questions or better describe this system, and well, yeah, I don't know the best way to make sense of it all. I just know that money likes to hang out with money, and money is a variant of power, more power is better than none, and we are all competing whether we want to or not...lots of way to get to the finish line but in the end, yeah, some of us humans are going to be minced on the way.